It's a Swivel Chair
by Dr. Breifs Cat
Summary: This is a problem because Tony fidgets.  Movie!Verse, T/P


**It's a Swivel Chair**

The chair on the opposite side of her desk swivels. This is a critical design flaw in the decor of her office. The chair on her side of the desk needs to swivel. This is a requirement. There are too many things she needs to look at over the course of her day to be seated in a chair that does not swivel. The swiveling potential of the visitor chair in and of itself is not a problem. It is an odd, unnecessary choice - the visitor need only look at her when he or she is seated in her office - but it had been what was immediately available to her when she took the office. There would be time, later, to redecorate or order specific pieces. The switch over to make Pepper Potts the CEO of Stark Industries was very sudden - from her perspective - and the paperwork and office decor decisions all happened very, very quickly. Tony had mulled over for some time before telling her anything about his intentions. The Legal Department was aware and ready for the change before she was. He had been thinking about his legacy and to whom to trust his name and his life's work when he was gone.

He had not been thinking about _furniture_.

The chair swivels. This is a problem because Tony _fidgets_. Quarter turn to the left. Quarter turn to the right. He spends more time looking at the doo-dads on her desk than he does making eye contact. She likes the doo-dads because they are expensive and self-important and fairly simple to acquire. They are the sort of items that someone who spends a lot of time in their office puts in said office. Pepper always had an office, but when she was his assistant, it was a mysterious, almost forbidden place. She didn't do a lot of sitting behind a desk and working in those days. She did a lot of sitting on a couch with her laptop on her knees and working. She did a lot of chasing Tony down and trying to wrangle him into working. Her old office had a plant once. It died.

They are trying to have a conversation about work.

Tony wants the mass production of Stark Industries new line of cellular phone to begin at the end of the month. He expects great things to happen for the company in the field of household electronics. America trusted him to protect their soldiers. Of course they will trust him with their computers, their telephones and their blenders. With the proper press releases and advertising, the Starkphone will become the new smart phone. If production begins at the end of the month, they will have warehouses across the country stocked just in time for Thanksgiving. The paper-pushers tell him if they play their cards right, his phone will be the number one item come Christmas.

None of this, Pepper disputes. However, the prototypes are not meeting the standards Tony set months ago. No one can replicate what he did when he first snapped the phone together in his basement one morning. If he'd go back down to the lab and write out clearer blueprints, they might have machines able to carry out mass production by the end of _next_ month. He finds this unacceptable on the basis that he is bored to death with cell phone design and wants to start an automotive division.

He is going to lose this argument. He knows he is going to lose this argument. She knows he is going to lose this argument. He fidgets. He swivels. He watches her doo-dads do their doo-dad dance.

He can't see her computer screen from where he sits, so he doesn't know Pepper is ordering a new, non-swivel chair online at this very moment because she can't take it anymore.

Tony isn't really the sort of person to gracefully accept losing, so rather than concede the point that the cell phone project cannot proceed without him, even if he is totally done with phones, he tries to change the subject. His official word for this is 'deflection' and it is best accomplished when he can subtly steer the conversation in another direction without his conversational partner catching on until it is too late. He is generally very good at this. Over the years, it has done wonders for his public persona. Tony knows how to promote the parts of himself that he wants to promote. He can make the parts that he doesn't want other people to see become invisible. It's also scored him a lot of tail. Unfortunately, around Pepper, his internal "Subtle" button tends to wildly malfunction. (Most people, he is sure, assume he doesn't have an internal "Subtle" button. Baby, that's just what he _wants_ you to think.)

His attempts at changing the subject are bizarre non-sequiturs. Pepper looks away from her computer screen and levels a particularly annoyed look at him. It's not the good annoyed look, either. It's the bad one. It's the one where he honestly might be in trouble. The good annoyed look, in addition to being kind of sexy, is also really easy to defuse. That's the one where he is just _barely_ on the wrong side of Irritating vs. Eccentric, Yet Adorable. This look Tony's getting now is the one where Pepper is about to kick him out on his ass.

As if it's _his_ fault no one else can follow his fairly simple instructions for revolutionizing the way people communicate.

Probably, he should just bypass talking to the engineering team and just design the factory bots himself. But that would take a couple hours that Tony really doesn't want to devote to this project, so. Purely electric cars are a more worthwhile use of his time, because he was once passionate about the environment for about three months and more importantly, _he hasn't already invented them._ But Pepper is not an artist like he is, she doesn't understand the creative process. She's more interested in the bottom line.

When Tony sees that look, he registers four options:

He could leave. Nothing about this course of action benefits him. True, he would like to be no longer participating in this argument, but the consequences would be many.

He could get thrown out. There are some positives with this one. The conversation would be over. Pepper will feel guilty once she's had some time to process everything, so she'll want to make it up to him. (Always worthwhile.) Tony will be in a position claim less responsibility over the whole affair. (A favorite position, ranked just below 'in the shower' and 'on his back.') But there's no telling how long it will take for her to cool down and he doesn't really want to be thrown out of a place that bears his name.

He could agree to get back onboard the cell phone project. They both know the only way he is getting out of this one is if they scrap the entire line of product and that would be a couple hundred hours of manpower wasted. Really, why fight it?

He could make a big romantic gesture that defuses her anger, changes the subject to something more pleasurable and when he goes back to take care of the phones later, it can be quietly done without a big to-do. No one's dignity nor ego need be infringed upon.

Because he is himself, he is drawn to the option that has the potential to yield the biggest pay-out, poses the biggest challenge, and frankly, poses the greatest risk.

If one was to chart his success rate with Big Romantic Gestures, the data would be a flat line. Right at 0.

Tony doesn't like flat lines. He likes curves.

So, he scoots his rolling swivel chair closer to her desk, plants his elbows on it and leans forward, and says, "Tell me you never think about that night," because this time, he _knows_ he's going to get a different answer this time.

Her eyes narrow, her mouth turns hard, she leans over the desk and Pepper enunciates quite clearly, "I _never_ think about that night."

Generally speaking, Tony likes to think of himself as a stoic, thick shelled example of masculinity that is not so sensitive as to have his delicate feelings hurt by a verbal barb from a woman. He is not. Not even close. He gapes at her like a particularly wounded fish, trying to work his brilliant mind around an admission of zero sentimentality and romantic fantasy from his own girlfriend, who last told him that she deeply loved him exactly three hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. Not that he counts. And yes, she had specified _deeply._

"Tony," she says, and her tone of voice lets him know that at the very least, he has traveled closer to where he wants to be on the scale of Irritating vs. Eccentric, Yet Adorable. He doesn't understand it, but his levels of attractiveness tend to correlate strongly to the amount of pain he is in at any given time, "I don't have to think about it anymore because I don't have to wonder about it anymore. All of the questions I used to ask myself have answers."

He fidgets. He still thinks about it. Not because Tony has questions about what would have gone down had they gone through with it - like Pepper, he is sure he now has a very good idea of what would have happened - but because it represents six months that they had lost for no reason. When his own life-saving implant was killing him, six months left to live felt like a very short amount of time, but the six months he had squandered felt like they could have been an entire geological age that would have been better spent being with Pepper.

"Life is short, Tony. I know you know that better than anyone. What I don't understand is why you waste so much time upset about the past or trying to avoid the future. All the time you spend moping or trying to get out of responsibilities that you know will have to own up to sooner or later is time you could be spending doing what you want if you weren't so set on making everything a fight. Or a joke."

The forty-five minutes they've spent arguing about phones already seems like an eternity. There are countless other ways he'd rather be spending that time with Pepper.

She isn't always graceful under pressure, but there is still a multitude of reasons why Pepper makes a better CEO than he did. The watchful eye she has on the bottom line is one. Her skill at keeping one particularly unmotivated employee-slash-controlling shareholder doing his job is another. And that is factoring in that her office is decorated with annoying doo-dads, his old junk and swivel chairs in places swivel chairs do not belong.

But she's working on that.

* * *

Disclaimers: Yeah, movie!fic...I don't even know. Marvel Studios, Fairview Entertainment and the like are owners of Iron Man 2.


End file.
